Exciting News! – Administrators at Rowan-Salisbury Schools learned late last night that the district is being awarded the ‘2020 Teacher and School Leader Incentive Program’ grant. The federal TSL grant titled, Accelerate Rowan, is valued at $26.3 million over the course of the next three years and is a program through the US Department of Education’s Office of Elementary & Secondary Education.

The announcement of RSS receiving the grant was made at the close of the Rowan-Salisbury Board of Education’s business meeting last night by Superintendent Dr. Lynn Moody.  “This is so exciting for Rowan-Salisbury, for our teachers, for our children, for our community,” says Moody. “This grant allows the work of Renewal to accelerate our goals and more quickly empower teachers to respond and engage with each child’s unique needs.  We are fortunate to have a supportive Board of Education as we entrench upon new learning techniques that boost student interests and passions. It is an extraordinary win for our district and for Rowan County!”

Through Renewal, RSS is committed to redesigning education to create authentic and personalized learning experiences for all students by implementing teacher-led development of curriculum, investing in professional development of teachers and leaders, and building an aligned and robust performance based compensation system (PBCS) to attract, recruit, hire and retain the highest quality educators for the children we are honored to serve.

Moody says that, “In Rowan-Salisbury Schools, we believe our community deserves a school system that empowers schools to create an engaged learning environment, so students enjoy learning and teachers enjoy teaching.”

Over the next days and weeks, RSS administrators will be meeting to put into action plans for implementing the next steps of the grant and to create procedures that align with the RSS Renewal Directional System. The three focus areas of the RSS Renewal Directional System are to engage our children through the development of Academic Skills, Interpersonal Skills, and by discovering their Unique Life Goals.

Accelerate Rowan is designed to accelerate system-wide implementation of Renewal through student-centered schools in which every student has an effective teacher and every school has effective leadership to improve the successful outcomes for all students.

“I could not be more excited and thrilled for what this grant means for the Renewal work we are doing for the children at Rowan-Salisbury,” says Moody.